:: ::

:: MAX BLACK ::

"Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron's cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience." --C.S. Lewis

"The Swiss pocket knife of conservative thought on the web..." - Eli Kardrakian

"Bookmark Max and dump your subscription to the newspaper; if you don't have a birdcage you really don't need it anyway..." - Shirley St. James

:: Friday, July 29, 2005 ::

Arianna Huffington's version of PlameGate

"Not everyone in the Times building is on the same page when it comes to Judy Miller. The official story the paper is sticking to is that Miller is a heroic martyr, sacrificing her freedom in the name of journalistic integrity.

"But a very different scenario is being floated in the halls. Here it is: It's July 6, 2003, and Joe Wilson's now famous op-ed piece appears in the Times, raising the idea that the Bush administration has 'manipulate[d]' and 'twisted' intelligence 'to exaggerate the Iraqi threat.' Miller, who has been pushing this manipulated, twisted, and exaggerated intel in the Times for months, goes ballistic. Someone is using the pages of her own paper to call into question the justification for the war - and, indirectly, much of her reporting. The idea that intelligence was being fixed goes to the heart of Miller's credibility. So she calls her friends in the intelligence community and asks, Who is this guy? She finds out he's married to a CIA agent. She then passes on the info about Mrs. Wilson to Scooter Libby (Newsday has identified a meeting Miller had on July 8 in Washington with an 'unnamed government official'). Maybe Miller tells Rove too - or Libby does. The White House hatchet men turn around and tell Novak and Cooper. The story gets out.

If this is the case, it's curious Rove or Libby haven't dropped the dime on Miller. I mean, if Rove is supposedly the Darth Vader of the Republican Party, wouldn't he push the New York Times over the cliff in a heartbeat exposing Miller as the original PlameGate leaker? It's also interesting to speculate that Miller's source might not be "in the intelligence community" at all. According to many reports, there were any number of people who knew Plame's thinly veiled identity and her relationship to Joe Wilson. And it's obvious Miller's ongoing series tacitly supporting the theory that Saddam was reconstituting his WMD progarm was totally at odds with the anti-war Democrats in Washington. Any number of Bush-hating wonks on the left would have had a motive to shut down Miller's investigation. I suppose if you believe Arianna's version of events above, you would also have to believe that Karl Rove is actually protecting the New York Times by not revealing Miller as the source of the leak - not a totally implausible scenario given the topsy-turvey relationships involved but it seems rather far-fetched to me. What's in it for Rove - or Bush for that matter - to cover for Judith Miller and the New York Times? Payback for her obediently "pushing...manipulated, twisted, and exaggerated intel in the Times"? That would be a stretch of truly MacheRovian proportions.

Note: The link above takes you to directly to PlameGate central; Tom Maguire

:: Max 3:09 PM [+] ::
...

---